“Happiness Is Possible”

We are living in a society today where many seem to have lost hope. While everyone wants to be happy, it seems that very few are. To be honest, if you just base your happiness on how things in the world are going, why would you be happy and hopeful. Hmmmmmm.

I read a meditation by former Pope Benedict XVI that shed light on this seeming dilemma. If we want to be happy, we need to agree with God who is the source of all happiness. Let me reference a few lines: 

• “Inner agreement with God belongs to the happy life. Only if this fundamental relationship is right can all the other relationships be right. For that reason it is important throughout one’s life and from one’s youth onwards to learn and to practice thinking with God, feeling with God, willing with God, so that love may grow from this and become the keynote of our life. 
• If that is the case, love of neighbor becomes self-evident…. love your neighbor as yourself…. People who are dissatisfied with themselves will not be really good to others. Those who do not accept themselves take exception to others…. 
• Through faith we must all learn a kind of Copernican revolution. Copernicus discovered that it was not the sun that went around the earth but that this earth along with the other planets revolved around the sun. We all begin by seeing ourselves as a tiny earth around which all the suns must turn. Faith teaches us to leave this error and to behave like brothers and sisters, joining together with all the others in the round dance of love around the one center that is God.
• Only if God exists, only if he becomes the center of my life, is this love my neighbor as myself possible. If he exists, if he becomes my center, then it is also possible to reach this inward freedom of love. (ref. “Love, the Keynote of Life by Pope Benedict XVI)

This is great advice from Pope Benedict on how to be happy, even in an “unhappy world”. Essentially we need to think like God thinks. We need to love as he shows us. We need to embrace the truth that we are not the center of the universe. When God becomes the center of our  life, the rest will fall into place. We will be able to love God and love our neighbor as our self….. truly loving our self. 

So, when God is in the right place in our life, we will be happy; and this happiness will not depend on the headlines from the 6 o’clock news. And this is very good news.